35 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 6-12-18”

  4. Safe on the east coast after a terrific flight on United– just want to give credit where credit is due.

    Why have you got the double bookshelves halfway through the room, Cheryl?

    Liked by 1 person

  5. Yesterday there was mention of Locks of Love. There is a lot of chatter among my peeps that they charge the recipients for the wigs they make, so “don’t donate to them.” Apparently there are other groups that collect hair and make wigs that do not charge and are better groups to which to donate. Supposedly hair salons are familiar with all of them and can explain and advise. I’ve never done it and don’t have first-hand experience, but am just passing along what I’ve heard.

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  6. That looks like my bookshelf before I got rid of most of my books.
    The print got too small.
    It’s really one of the things I miss most.

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  7. Michelle, I posted part of this on last weekend’s rants and raves, and a couple of people asked me to send a photo to show what I meant, and so I did.

    With the girls gone, we are empty nesters, but I was hoping we could get a three bedroom place and we just got two. My husband does watercolor, and hadn’t had a devoted studio, so he determined he needed one. But I wanted a third bedroom that could function as a combination guest room and craft place for me. We figured out what to do for guest space (and it should work well), but that still left me short of an area to do crafts. In my single days I could work on cards on the dining room table for a week straight if I wanted to, but as a married woman I have done it for a couple of hours and then put everything away, which isn’t always the ideal way to work on a big project. (Clean-up time can be longer than work time, but if the project is left out you can work on it if you have a spare ten minutes.)

    In the previous house we had a library that included desks for him and for me (and a loveseat). My husband took an idea from “real” libraries, and rather than just having bookcases on the outside of the room, he turned the family room into a library by having bookcases along two walls, the built-in unit along a third wall, our desks near the back picture window, and four large bookcases jutting out into the room back to back.

    Well, here he took the “row of large bookcases” to an even farther extreme, dividing the large living room about a third of the way across with all four of those units side by side, jutting into the room. They are seven feet tall plus crown molding (the molding isn’t all up yet in the photo), and the widest one is about three feet wide. Together they make a wall across the room, with a doorway at the end, and behind that wall is space for me. We have three more bookcases on my side (back to back with the ones on the other side) and then a storage unit. On my back wall I will have the storage units from Ikea (20 cubes that are 13 inches square and 15 inches deep) and back to back to back with my computer desk a small table on which to do crafts–and if it’s messy at times, that’s OK, since visitors to the house won’t be seeing it unless I show it to them. The “small table” is also from Ikea, and it has a leaf to extend it when I need a larger surface. (It’s the same table we bought for our breakfast nook, only a different color.) And on this side of the craft area is my office area. My reference books are within reach on the bookcases at the left, and to the right is a window with a bit of a view. Not anything like the view I had in the country, but that’s OK. If I swivel my office chair I can reach more bookcases behind me (my area around my chair wasn’t really set up yet in the photo, but you can see a hint of my desk). I can also easily look out and see the rest of the house, so I won’t feel claustrophobic when I’m working, but I can feel “cozy” back in my craft area (I won’t see the rest of the house from there).

    So I didn’t get my third bedroom, but I think I got something that will “work” even better–dedicated space that I won’t have to keep neat in case of company. And I have a better computer desk and better workspace than I had in that library, too. And we do have company space (we will have two sleeper sofas, one in his studio and one in our family room–both have locking doors, since the family room is a former garage), and we now have a dining room (we had a small eat-in kitchen in the previous house, its worst feature since it only seated five people). We lost a garage, instead of upgrading to an attached garage as he desired–but he’s so happy to have given up yardwork on an acre of land that he doesn’t mind.

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  8. Thanks for reposting Cheryl. Those are beautiful bookshelves. I am going to eventually need to get some for my home when I retire.

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  9. Just got back from the graduation and the reception. A wonderful, God-honoring ceremony. The grads pick the music. They looked a little tired until we began singing their songs and they just came alive with a spirit of worship. I was given a ticket and included as part of the family of my principal, whose two twin boys I had taught. So sweet.

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  10. I knew that was library shelving. It looks great.

    That is what has been partially dismantled at church now to turn the library
    into a children’s area. This past Sunday and next Sunday the library at church is open for members to take what they like. The left over will be donated to CLI, a prison ministry.

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  11. I kinda hung back and was sitting in the back at the reception. Then I got tired and was getting ready to go. Chrissy, the mom, came to me and said, did we get your picture with the boys. I said no, but that is okay. She told me to come up on the stage where they were taking pictures and I got the picture I truly wanted with all my heart. I just didn’t want to ask for it. I got a picture of me with all of the students that I had taught. What a treasure!

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  13. My husband claimed the four bookcases you can see for theology books–commentaries and so on–and he was in the process of sorting them. He used up that whole area and needs a bit more space! Think visitors might be a bit intimidated by that big a wall of commentaries?!

    On the near side of the bookcases (the side from which I am taking the photo) is a couch with its back to the bookcases (but about a yard between them). We will eventually buy two chairs to make a living room area. Beyond that area is a wall nook with our piano. And if you continue to the left (left when you are sitting on the sofa and looking ahead to the chairs and then the piano) is a dining room, a feature we didn’t have in our last home. (We also have a separate family room.)

    In fact, before we moved in we had even bought eight chairs from a local favorite restaurant–a place our family had been visiting for more than twenty years. (My husband, his late wife, and the girls used to have spring break one county over, and my husband dreamed of someday living in this area.) He talked about how lovely the chairs in that restaurant were, and how he would like to get some like them if he could, but similar ones he found online were costly. Well, when we were in the process of moving down here (we hadn’t even bought a home yet), we were going into that restaurant, and I reminded him that he wanted to ask them where they bought their chairs. He asked, and the waiter told him, and told him actually they were selling some of their own chairs! He named a price about a third of the price my husband had found online for such chairs. We talked about it over lunch, and decided to buy four chairs (not knowing what kind of dining space we would end up getting). After we bought, and knew we had a dining room, we ate in that restaurant again, and we asked them if they had any more chairs to sell, and they had four more, and so we bought them too! Four of those chairs are still in our church basement, and we don’t yet have a dining table, but maybe someday I will send a photo of those, too. We got to choose our own eight chairs, and my husband thought it was even better that they are used ones, chairs with signs of wear, each one looking a little different with different wear marks, and chairs that we ourselves, his late wife, the girls, and/or my parents-in-law might have sat on sometime in the last quarter century! And we imagine grandchildren might choose a favorite chair, maybe even name them.

    Oh, you can’t necessarily tell in the photo, but we took off the molding from the bottom of the wall so that the end (largest) bookcase could be anchored directly to the wall, and the others connected to it. We made sure we bought a home with a slab, for a good solid foundation for all those books. So the bookcases are now built in. We don’t plan to move again, but if for some reason we do, those six bookcases will stay, or so my husband says now. We will have bookcases in virtually every room of the house besides these. Board games are stored in those cabinets under the books. I don’t have cabinets on the ones on my side, so I need the Ikea storage. The walls are painted a bit of a minty green in this big room and our bedroom, and the hall will be the same color.

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  14. Oh, one day I was unpacking books back in my area and we had a plumber in. He could hear noises coming from behind the bookcases, and expressed to my husband a measure of shock that we made ourselves a room back there. My husband laughed and said, “yes, we made an area for my wife.” And then he said louder (to me), “We can hear you back there” and I said, “I can hear you, too.”

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  15. Morning! Cheryl those are lovely bookcases. One thing I dislike is to get rid of books. My husband has no problem with it all, saying let others enjoy what you have done already. I don’t mind clearing out books I did not enjoy. However, I hold onto my most cherished books, even though as Chas said, the print just gets smaller. 😉

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  16. I thought we had a large bookcase, but my oh my!

    Years ago a carpenter in our church was dismantling a law office to convert it into a doctor’s office. He had several 8′ tall by 4′ wide by 1′ deep bookcases he was giving away. Solid wood, too, not particle board. We got one of them and used it as a pantry at first, but as our book collection increased and we moved into houses with more cabinet space, the bookcase got filled with books. Yes, we have moved that thing several times. Each place we just bolt it to a wall and fill it up.

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  17. Linda- We heard that about Locks of Love also. That was the last time any of the ladies donated hair (5 or 6 years ago). Now Mrs L’s hair goes past her shoulders.

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  19. Wow, now those are bookcases! You need a secret revolving door for your little space behind there. Then you’ll start writing a series of best-selling mystery novels under a secret pen name and you’ll be come famous and ….

    My favorite bookcases are three not-huge ones with glass doors, picked up at antique stores through the years. One of them I’ve re-purposed as a dining piece for dishes as I’ve been shipping excess books out of here at a pretty fast clip over the past couple years. And then there’s the little old ‘spinning’ bookcase, now in the den and awaiting to be filled with books again (in many cases, the books I was keeping got shifted to the garage in boxes as furniture was being moved around in here — it may happen again when I paint, of course). I haven’t filled one

    I have a roll top desk in the den with a hutch-style book case (with glass doors) that sits on top of that — the entire piece is a bit “big” for me now as I’ve been trying to lower the furniture profile in my house, but it’s useful still, I need a desk and I need that book space. For now it stays. And it is a handsome piece that I’ve had for 30 years or so (though it’s not an antique — if I were to replace it, I’d poke around for a smaller, genuinely old desk from the early 1900s or earlier).

    I also tend to hang on to commentaries and reference books, though of course those are now mostly online these days I suspect and easily accessible. But I’m keeping enough books that I’ll be challenged to find shelf “homes” for them all in the house, so some may have to stay in boxes for the time being until I figure that out or am willing to move those out, too.

    I’m still miserable with these bug bites, I resorted to Benadryl last night and will take it again today, even though it makes me sleepy, along with the cortisone-10 cream in generous amounts. I must have 10 bites on all my limbs, but the 3 on my left arm are giving me the biggest problem right now, I wake up rubbing or scratching them in the night. I must be highly allergic to whatever got to me. I also picked up some insect repellant which I’ll wear to the dog park from now on and probably when I’m out gardening as well.

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  20. Benadryl cream? Works well for bites. And Sting Eze. And some antibiotic because once you start scratching….At least, that is what helps around here.

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  21. Another six miles in this morning, on the bike. Thanks for the incentive, Linda. Nobody told me it was all up hill there and back.

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  23. I like creative solutions such as the bookshelves as a room divider. I’ve done that before and it worked out very well. In one home we had a whole room dedicated to books (mostly Cyrus’ programing books) but we sold most of those off when we moved a few years ago. Now we have only a few bookshelves full. Dad has many theology books and teaching books that I have been taking home a little at a time. He has a smaller space than we do and he’s been paring down in the past year. We’re also trying to rearrange an under-utilized room in case he wants to come live with us in the next year or two. He’s very healthy and independent at 92, and doesn’t particularly want to move the 30 miles to Chattanooga, so we’ll put that off as long as possible.

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  24. A friend’s mom says that putting Vick’s VapoRub on bug bites helps. Recently, I tried a trick I had heard of – heating a spoon under very hot water and pressing it on the bite. My water was taking too long to get hot, and I didn’t want to waste water, so I abandoned that, but a moment or two later, pressed my hot coffee cup against the bite for several seconds. That did the trick!

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  25. Jo – I had the same idea as Cheryl, to take in a photo of yourself with your hair the way you like it, or find a photo elsewhere of the hairstyle you like.

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  26. Speaking of haircuts, Nightingale did a nice job cutting and layering my hair this morning. Looks cute! (We decided against the “undercut” idea.)

    Last week, she, with Chickadee’s help, used the new dog-hair trimmer we bought to give Heidi her short summer cut. Since the paw area is tricky to do, she left “boots” on her, which is a really cute look. She also could not do Heidi’s face area, as that freaked Heidi out too much. Even so, she looks really cute with her now very short body hair, “boots”, feather tail, and still-shaggy face.

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  28. I could do that, but not sure it would all fit in my dresser. Not sure I have 2000 lying around waiting to go on candy either but that is a side issue.

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  32. I actually saw the gal who cut my hair this week at the reception. She sat next to me for a bit. I realized her haircut is what I want! So after it grows quite a bit, I will tell her to cut it like yours.

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  35. I actually spent over $2500. It’s for the camp tuck shop and will hopefully last for a while. It was a fun trip though, as the chef came with me and we had fun talking and shopping together.

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